Paul Richard James

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Paul Richard James answers our top 5:

what medium(s) do you work in?
I am primarily an oil painter, with a great interest in the classical tradition.
However, over the past five years I have begun a series of mixed media pieces, which are photo based and are heavily worked up afterwards with encaustic. At the same time, I am interested in Environmental Art and installation art. Over the years, I have tried to push oil painting outside of the gallery environment and into the streets. I have installed a series of painted billboards inspired by Anarchist propaganda in various locations in Toronto. I have attempted to push painting into the realm of sculpture through my painted cutouts (full size plywood cut-outs of Hazmat figures). I often make art with whatever I can find.


what question do you wish would be asked in an interview and how would you answer it?
What’s wrong with the art world?
Don’t get me started!

why art? and why art in hamilton?
I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t making art. I grew up watching my father paint, and I always romanticized the life of artists. I can’t imagine living a life without art. It is simply what I was meant to do.
Hamilton! Well on the most basic level, it has affordable houses, and everything else you need, and it has a kind of Brooklyn feel. Artists will always be attracted to cheap rents, large studios, historic architecture, and working class culture. I have lived in the country and in Toronto, and Hamilton suits my lifestyle right now. It is nice to know that you can get out of the city and go to a really nice beach in less than an hour; without sitting in traffic. And my parents and sister live in Grimsby.

who or what inspires you?
Just about everything inspires me. I mean that!
I am an image junkie; media images and unmediated images, It could be way that light might fall against someone’s face, or the colour of something or the brutal image of war as it is presented as a fractured pixilated picture on CNN. I find some beauty in the banal as well. Some great art has been a celebration of the banal. I think what interests me is how bizarre this world is, how fractured this reality is. How beautiful existence can be at one moment, and how horrific it can be at the next. The pain humans have to live with, mixed with some pleasure, but mostly a kind of alienation. I have too many ideas; it is more a matter of being able to focus this inspiration into something that other people would want to look at.
Some things (and artists) which inspire me:
Francis Bacon, Keifer, Henry Darger, Rembrandt, Odd Nerdrum, Valesquez, Andrew Wyeth, John Singer Sargent, Caravaggio, Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, Pink and Blue period Picasso, Rodin, any Street artist, fascist imagery, medical images, distortion, storms, entropy, rot, pot, anarchism, revolution, weapons, objectification, the sound of one hand clapping.

any wisdom you'd like to share about living as an artist?
Don’t stop making art. Artists are artists because they make art, good art, bad art, the important thing is to keep making these things we call art. Too many people claim to be artists and simply don’t produce. Art is not a hobby.
Work is the thing you do in order for your body to survive, art is what you do for your soul to survive.

Is there anything in your art that you are afraid people might discover?
Yes, a badly painted hand, or perhaps a badly painted ear, or a badly painted passage between two tones.

Paul Richard James A.O.C.A, B.F.A., B.Ed, is a Welsh born artist who now lives in Hamilton in the Locke Street village.
After moving to Hamilton, Paul opened the Bold Gallery on Bold Street at Locke (across from the Starbucks). Two years later, he transformed the Gallery into an Atelier and now teaches the Classical Painting method to 30 students. www.oldmasters.ca
As an artist, Paul works on several bodies of work at one time. His work is both traditional and radical in approach and content. His “Seduction” series uses imagery from fashion periodicals as a starting point. His “Lilly” series are large-scale abstract paintings based on experiments with digital imagery. His “Torso” series are mixed media encaustic works using the torso as a means of exploration. Paul has also completed a series of painting based on Anarchist Propaganda and is most recently focused on images representing the Mensur, or Academic Fencing Tradition, with its emphasis on the glorious wound.
www.paulrichardjames.com

http://www.paulrichardjames.com
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